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To: Chip McVickar who wrote (103)	5/12/1998 9:42:00 PM
From: ShoppinTheNet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3536

Hi Chip! thanks for your response to my inquiry regarding the loss or plight of the small farmer in America. In your initial post, you stated you had read about the loss of the small farmer in Minnesota. I was raised in a major Minnesota City, yet I was the son of two parents who were raised on small family farms, one in northern and one in southern MN. To this day I have several relatives on small farms in Minnesota. I have also been to the auctions of others that decided to give it up. My brother in the last year moved from the city and its life to rural Wisconsin to take up bee keeping full time. The town I lived in was Cow Town USA, home of the world's largest stockyards. There as a child, I had a birds eye view of the NFO protests as they fought to raise the prices of their products by killing and burying cattle or the pouring of milk on the streets in protest. Some of my relatives were NFO members and others were not. The protests often got ugly. I spent most of my holiday meals around the table in a Minnesota farmhouse listening to the often-heated discussions of the city dweller vs. the farmer's condition. I can assure you, I have heard both sides of the discussion. I fondly remember the butter vs. Ollie (made from soybeans) argument quite well. Dairy farmers did not at all like soybean farmers cutting into their sales. Soybeans were often grown on dairy farms in Minnesota making the discussion even that much more interesting. In my sales travels, I have visited Mennonite communal farms in the Dakotas. I have also seen many Omish farms in Indiana and Pennsylvania. I am not a farm expert in any way. I am not against large farms or the single-family farm. I am a capitalist who studied Economics and business at the University of Minnesota. With this in mind, I believe that less government influence is best. Let the fit survive. True efficiencies will drive the price down for the consumer. You need to be the low cost, high quality producer to survive in today's global economy. If a tractor can till a 10,000-acre farm and produce cheaper corn, so be it. I myself find it funny that everyone thinks big farms are better and more efficient, yet the Omish are running the truly cost effective farms. There are niche crops that small farmers can focus on to compete with the mega farms, just like a smart local merchant can compete against Wal Mart. It is true that many local merchants were run out of business by Wal-Mart, yet others have thrived because of the traffic they have brought to the area. Regarding subsidies, as I pointed out in my last post they were originally developed to stimulate the production of a commodity to support a major need for the war effort. Politicians in the past used these vote-generating programs to attract the farm vote, which was the major voting block. Thus subsidies provided job security for the incumbent politician. What has happened over the years of course is the farm vote has shrunk as rural folks moved off the farm to the city for better paying jobs. Even the Omish are seeing this happen as the family farm can only be split between so many sons. Your point regarding the mistakes caused by the large farm I do not agree is valid or fair. Your statement of the lead in the cans during the civil war would indicate to me that this was at a time when most farms in the north were still small family farms. Regarding the Millorganite from Milwaukee's waste treatment plant, I would assume that this product is available to all size farms. I have used the product myself on my own lawn. The point is that size does not necessary mean more corruption or uneducated mistakes on the farm. It can happen at all levels of production. The major agriculture colleges and universities develop many of these agriculture changes, good or bad, and then they teach them to all farmers, big and small. Regarding your point of "what is being lost and why smallness has some validity. If you lived in a city or suburbs you would not understand the qualities of community that are the hart of the contentious struggle that is taking place between qualities of the community". This is a valid argument. Our lifestyles are changing and many argue not for the better. What will make us revert back to the simpler lifestyle you feel we should keep, will not be the failure of the UROH or the keeping of the farm subsidies. It will be our conscious choice to put an economic value on those aspects of our life, and make personal changes to make this a reality. I have seem my 11 year old son desire this change after coming out of a small toy store in Wabon MA, a wealthy bedroom community of Boston. This town section is only a block long yet it gave the feeling of a small German town. My son looked at me and said he wanted to move to a town with all small retailers, because because their stores were more interesting, and they gave you better service.